Recommendations
Books Like La Vie mode d'emploi by Georges Perec
Books for readers who loved the apartment building and Perec's exhaustive formal architecture of stories within stories
La Vie mode d'emploi (1978) is the most fully realised Oulipo novel — a Parisian apartment building described at one moment in time, structured by a knight's-tour constraint, centred on Bartlebooth's fifty-year project of watercolours and jigsaws. These 8 books share its formal ambition, its love of lists and encyclopaedic accumulation, and its embedding of human stories within elaborate structural frameworks.
- 1
Buy on AmazonLes Choses
by Georges Perec
The accessible debut — very short and the best introduction to Perec's preoccupations (consumer desire, exhaustion, failure) before the vast formal architecture of La Vie mode d'emploi.
- 2
Buy on AmazonW ou le souvenir d'enfance
by Georges Perec
The personal companion — what La Vie mode d'emploi approaches through formal architecture, W approaches through autobiography; together they are the two faces of the same project.
- 3
Buy on AmazonIf on a winter's night a traveler
by Italo Calvino
The Italian Oulipo-adjacent formal novel — a novel made of beginnings of novels, in which the reader becomes a character; shares the architectural self-consciousness and the delight in narrative as formal structure.
- 4
Buy on AmazonInvisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
Marco Polo's impossible cities described to Kublai Khan — the same encyclopaedic impulse as La Vie mode d'emploi, organised around a conceptual grid rather than a physical one.
- 5Buy on Amazon
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
A novel that contains other novels — the Devil visits Soviet Moscow, and the novel expands to include the story of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua; shares the delight in stories-within-stories and the structural ambition of Perec.
- 6
Buy on AmazonMidnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
The other great encyclopaedic novel of 1980 — the same digressive accumulation of stories, histories, and characters within a structural frame, and the same sense that narrative form can bear the weight of an entire world.
- 7Buy on Amazon
The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
A walk along the Suffolk coast that expands into European history, art, and disaster — the same digressive encyclopaedic impulse as Perec, but without the formal constraint and with a melancholy that Perec keeps at bay through wit.
- 8
Buy on AmazonHouse of Leaves
by Mark Z. Danielewski
The architectural horror novel — a house that is larger on the inside than the outside, documented in footnotes and appendices; shares La Vie mode d'emploi's interest in the formal architecture of a building as a container for stories.
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